quisition on the point whether, if Julius Cæsar Scaliger had known all about Erasmus's illegitimacy, he would have taunted him with the circumstance. All this is amusing enough, for a livelier reasoner than Peter Bayle it would not be easy to find anywhere. But he riots in his favourite weaknesses, and sacrifices better things to their indulgence. England has especial reason to be vexed with this eminent writer. The success of his Dictionary, in an age when folios were more cheerfully received than at present, induced the pro specimens of a great literature; and unquestionably the department is a barren one. On the other hand, it would be tedious to enumerate the works which, claiming a place in literary biography, are too dull for perusal or too obscure for remembrance. In how many cases has the weak admirer, the foolish relative, done a mischief to the memory which he wished to honour; sometimes by telling too much, sometimes by telling too little,-now smoothering, like an awkward nurse, the growing young fame he wants to nourish, now starving from his poverty of brainjectors of the 'Biographia Britannica' to and heart the flower that he is planting on a venerated grave! It must be admitted that our masters of antiquity failed to set us a good example in this particular branch of biography. Yet biography is one of the arts which they carried to perfection; as witness the pages flowing with milk and honey-the milk of kindness and honey of eloquence -of Plutarch; witness that exquisite biography the Agricola,' preserving the good old Roman general's face like a finely-executed gold coin; or the easy abundance of characteristic anecdote in the 'Cæsars' of Suetonius; or the fluent and pointed neatness of Nepos. Men of letters, however, found no Plutarch, not even, like the philosophers (who yet were a branch of the body), a Diogenes Laertius. Meagre paragraphs are all we have about Virgil and Horace; and it is little that we know with certainty of Aristophanes and Menander. So the moderns may claim an excuse. Unluckily, too, literary biography has been injured by some who might have been expected to be its most successful friends. Nobody can deny the wit, the vivacity, the literature of Bayle. He was, perhaps, a typical man of letters in the strictest sense of the term, devoted to books, and with an admirable talent for the lively exposition and discussion of all that books can teach. He has left in his great store-house of point, argument, and erudition, many valuable memoirs of the authors, not only of antiquity but of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How valuable these are; but how marred by his execrable method! The man's inveterate passion for controversy and his unwholesome appetite for quotation have ruined his book. Like Ophelia, his muse is dragged to death by her own garments. His extravagant use of annotation, always lengthy, often irrelevant, and sometimes indecent, is the weakness which damages the Dictionary of Bayle. In the article 'Erasme,' for instance, he has a long dis imitate the form and manner of his work, a manner provoking in him, and therefore almost intolerable in less brilliant men. The result has been to lower a class of books which might have had an admirable effect on the whole culture and spirit of the country, into the rank of mere heavy compilations of crude information. Biography is not even excepting poetry-that branch of literature which most directly inspires and influences the popular mind. Philosophers may see principles in history, but the multitude only see persons. To the Scotch peasant Scottish history is the story of the lives of Bruce and Wallace,-of John Knox and the Covenanters,-of Burns the poet. In England, if the people talk of the great war, they embody it all in Nelson and Wellington. Hence, too, the most popular fictions are those where the interest centres in an individual,-like Robinson Crusoe. What a pity that our biography should be so indifferently done, and in many cases not done at all! If, however, it be really true that the life of a man of letters must be dull, the friends of literary biography have no right to complain: they must submit to destiny, for who can contend with the course of nature? It may, however, be worth while, before dealing specially with Mr. Burgon's pleasant book, to put the dictum to the question; for it connects itself with many interesting, and some very high as well as nice points of inquiry. There are many men of letters-supposing the objection of what is called dearth of incident' to be fatal to biography-with regard to whose lives that objection can never be truly made. There is much more variety of character in the literary class than is vulgarly supposed. Some amongst them have won no inconsiderable honour in public life, as statesmen, orators, or diplomatists, like Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Bacon, Buchanan, Grotius, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Herbert of Cher bury, Niebuhr, or Edmund Burke. Some times altering his route to avoid a band of have proved very fit for practical affairs by the admission of competent judges, though the accidents of life have prevented their rising so high as they deserved: of these are Swift, Defoe, Dr. Johnson, and Voltaire, the last of whom was prosperous as a man of business. Fielding, again, made a useful police magistrate; and, though we cannot mention the fact without indignation, Burns has been shown by Mr. Chambers to have been an excellent gauger. A good many of the class have fought as well as their neighbors, mingling laurel and bay; for example, Eschylus, Xenophon, Cervantes, Sir Walter Raleigh, the elder Scaliger, Ben Jonson, Vauvenargues, and Paul Louis Courier: so that in most of these cases-and very conspicuously in some of them-abundant material for biographical interest exist. Yet few of these great men have met with good biographers. Cicero has been fortunate in Conyers Middleton; though, even in that instance, there is too much of the peculiar tone of Middleton's age and opinions in his book for it ever again to be as popular as at its first appearance. We have still to be contented with what is admitted to be a learned, but denied on all sides to be an interesting, memoir of Buchanan, who yet led a life abounding in adventures: was driven from Scotland for satirising the Franciscans; from Paris by necessity; from Bordeaux by plague; was imprisoned in Lisbon under suspicion of heresy, and relieved his confinement by translating the Psalms; came home to Scotland to act with the Protestant party, and sat as Moderator of the General Assembly, having shared in every struggle of his times. Grotius, in Burigni's hands, has fared no better; and the completest Life of Raleigh is still that of Oldy's the antiquary, one of the prosiest of writers. So much for the more famous of those men of letters whose careers have had most in common with the careers of men of action. But there have also been authors not formally employed in public affairs, perhaps not well qualified for them, who have still led lives remarkable for the stir and bustle, variety and activity, which biographers insist on in the subjects of their art. Erasmus, for instance, travelled a great deal, and in a romantic kind of way; now taking up his quarters with some great noble who encouraged letters, now in a village inn, where, if he was seen reading, he was suspected of being a wiz ard; sometimes trotting on his mule steadily through a vine-growing country, some robbers. He was a man full of geniality and humour, who brought into life whatever was valuable in literature, and carried into literature, in return, all the freshness of life, which we take to be just the desirable qualities in a man of letters as distinguished from a bookworm. He left behind him, like most of the old scholars, an abundance of correspondence; but, in the hands of Jortin and Burigni, Erasmus is a far duller person than the original. He is not dull in Holbein's portrait, nor in the Colloquia;' nor was he so esteemed by his contemporaries. Both the Scaligers, again, had character, and were not reading and writing machines. Rabelais, though some of the traditions about him are, no doubt, as fabulous as that which in Scotland declared Buchanan to have been the King's fool, was clearly a humourist in life as in genius. It is certain that Shakspeare was a flowing and charming talker; and that his social success was by no means so disproportionate as some may fancy to his wonderful endowments. Smollett's career was essentially literary, but full of adventure; a career of controversy varied by imprisonment, and involving a curious medley of different acquaintances. What that of Rousseau was we know from his Confessions.' Such men as these were surely interesting men in their lives, if somebody with eyes to see had only looked at them for us, or might even now be discerned as such by the help of illustrative records. Unfortunately, indeed, in the instances of many great writers, these records are scanty, precisely because, in old times, the importance of literature was not foreseen; while, in modern times, the motion that the mere life of a writer was the least important fact about the poor man, has indisposed even his lion-hunters to preserve anecdotes of him. When Johnson made inquiries about Dryden from the only survivors who remembered him in the flesh, he got exactly two petty stories; and, but for Boswell, we verily believe that by this time the Doctor himself would have been beginning to pass for a dull fellow. The vulgar love marvels, and there is something too piquant in the notion that a man may be a great writer and yet personally commonplace, to be easily surrendered. Goldsmith himself owes part of his popularity to the general impression that he was a weak fellow. Lord Macaulay is not fonder of antithesis than the multitude; and the reader may remark that in a country place the two persons about whom there is most curiosity and interest exhibited are the squire, and the village idiot. Want of record is, no doubt, a fatal objection to literary biography. But there is much more known than has yet been wisely used, even about Shakspeare, who still waits the man that is to distil from the gathered lore of the antiquaries the precious ointment of critical biography. What, however, is it-and this is our next point-that is meant by the peculiar dearth of incidents' in the lives of authors? What is an 'incident? Everybody cannot win a battle; overthrow a government (though this last feat has been achieved by very ordinary folk in our days); sail round the world; be flung out of the château d'If in a sack, like Monte Christo; or gallop away with a damsel on his horse, like young Lochinvar. These are the kind of exploits people are thinking of when they talk of incidents' and of 'interest.' The active and physical sources of interest are what they want. But are they the deepest sources of it after all? It is the child that is most keen after the 'story' in everything; and we may observe that, even in fiction, the most impressive fictions are not those remarkable for fable or plot. Hamlet himself, and not his killing or being killed by Laertes, is the magical element in the play. Don Quixote might have been put through a quite different order of adventures, and still fascinate us as the Don. Tristram Shandy is hardly a story at all. In fact, if the story were the great charm of any book, it is not easy to see why it should be read above twice, when it must necessarily be remembered. We do not, however, wish to push this view too far; while we are fully sensible of the subsidiary value of narrative in exhibiting other elements. We are chiefly anxious to dispel the notion that incidents' in the vulgar sense are necessary to the interest of a Life. He who leads, as far as outward events are concerned, the most apparently commonplace existence, may yet be an object of justly profound curiosity. All the domestic and sentimental, all the intellectual and moral life of such a man, may be pregnant with material for thought and instruction. The story of the late Charlotte Bronte is prosaic enough on the surface. A clergyman's daughter, in a remote district, she went out as a governess, and by-and-bye wrote a successful novel. But who does not think of her life with fifty times the interest' he feels in all the peregrinations of Madame Ida Pfeiffer? It is character it is the heart-that excites the sympathy and the deepest curiosity of the world. Nothing is more certain than that the kind of interest here indicated may degenerate into morbid curiosity; and that an over anxiety to feed the taste might corrupt biography. The world must protect itself against these, as against other dangers to which it is exposed. Our business is only to point out that literary biographers have never yet drawn on their proper resources, and that they would improve their art by keeping some neglected truths in mind. Let them reflect, for instance, that the struggles for fame, or bread, or knowledge, of a gifted nature, are as good subjects of narrative as the adventures of sailor or soldier;-that there is as much fun to be got out of the wanderings and controversies of a great wit and humourist like Smollett, as out of the rambles through life, and scrambles for celebrity, of an equally clever politician or player. From a merely artistic point of view, we contend that the writers of literary biography are ignorant of their own advantages. What makes the defects of this department of letters so glaring is, that, perhaps, no men enjoy so much of the fame of a nation as its authors. Many a man has read 'Don Quixote' who did not know what King of Spain Cervantes lived under, and never cared to ask. And so with many books. But the next step-though, to be sure, there are many who never take it-is to ask about the writer who has given us such pleasure. Here the admirer is generally disappointed. There are few materials, perhaps; or, more commonly, he learns that the great man did nothing but write, the nothingness being not in himself but in his observers, and that, therefore, he was necessarily an uninteresting person. A puzzle ought here to present itself to the admiring inquirer. How came an uninteresting person to write an interesting book? A most suggestive question, we need not say, but on which little light is thrown by the critics; for it is one of the strangest things about the present subject, that the whole philosophy of the connexion between literature and life remains unexplored. Nobody can tell us how the power of writing is related to the character, nor, generally, what relation it bears to the other qualities of a man. The real characters of Napoleon or Queen Elizabeth are more easy to come to an agreement about, than those of Goethe, or Bacon, or Shakspeare. Some of the most knotty and piquant | shyness of Gray; Pope's nap after dinner; points connected with such questions are Prior's taste for low company; Hobbes's moot points to this day-for instance, habit of locking himself up to smoke and whether, on the whole, a good writer (not think all day with the shutters closed; and a skilful writer, but one whose influence the conversational poverty of Addison, is good) is naturally to be expected to be Goldsmith, Cowley, Echard, and Dryden. a good man? Many people will tell you There is an agreeable oddity about facts, 'No,' and quote the saying about Sterne, or supposed facts, like these; an oddity the dead ass, and the living mother, in which the mass of people would much proof of the fact that a man may write prefer, we may be sure, to a critical inbeautiful sentiment, and be a heartless vestigation of them, an explanation of the rascal. Or, they will excl im of Rous-apparent contradiction involved in them, seau, as Moore's Miss Biddy Fudge did, and a careful collection of the facts on the 'Alas! that a man of such exquisite notions, Should send his poor brats to the Foundling, my dear!' And, so, they will conclude that a genius may be a good or bad man, and that we must draw a line between genius and character. Somehow, however, the instinct of the world impels it the other way; and hence the vindications' of which literature is full. In spite of Pope's famous line about Bacon, it is not easy to reconcile oneself to his being a villain. If, on the whole, men of intellect were bad men, how could the world, which is, at least, governed through them, be a tolerable place? If there was no connexion between character and writing, would literature itself be tolerable? A book is to a man-of-letters what an action is to a man of action,-his peculiar way of expressing his nature. When a good book is said to come from a bad man, the general analogy of things seems violated; and the apparent prodigy ought to be carefully investigated. Such are the important questions floating about, unsettled, and waiting the literary biographer's help. Difficulties of the same kind meet him at every step; arising from the ignorance in which we are wrapped of the connexion between what authors are and what they produce. Everybody assumes that a practical philanthropist is philanthropical, or a great general brave; and would expect to find the Howard or Wellington of private life harmonious counterparts of their public character. But a different impression wanders about the world regarding authors. The humourist may be a melancholy being the poet a prosaic one-the innovating and daring philosopher a timid man-the comic writer as dull as most metropolitan members. People dwell with a feeling of piquancy on the reputed gloominess of Molière; the fatness and Jaziness of Thompson: the silence and other side. But so long as the notion prevails, that what a man writes affords no index to what he is, so long literary biography must be a dull subject. The reader, concluding that he has the best of the man in his works, will be incurious about his biography; and the biographer who assumes that his own performance must be flat, will be exceedingly likely to make it so. The whole world, however, notwithstanding that bad biographers have done much to spoil it, does not cheerfully acquiesce in the non-interesting theory. Another form of the same instinct which makes them hesitate to believe that a man who has no heart or principles himself can touch the heart or strengthen the principles of other people, likewise inclines them to wonder how a man can be brilliant in his study and no better than a mediocrity for practical purposes when he passes the study-door. The public, as a mass, prefers a marvel to anything; but the more thinking portion has a strong desire for order and harmony in the intellectual world, as elsewhere. They see that it prevails in the rest of creation, and they do not relish anomalies, or the predominance of anomalies, at all events, in the world of letters. Hence in spite of the tradition as to the lives of authors being dull, they feel a vivid curiosity about them; and, on the whole (unless they themselves should have utterly failed in some literary undertaking), they are inclined to believe well of their characters, and hopefully of their conversation. Occasionally, perhaps, they track to their source the anecdotes on which the popular impressions about great writers rest. They find that the 'dead ass and living mother' antithesis concerning Sterne occurs in the Walpoliana,' which excites scepticism; that the original authority for Congreve's affected remark to Voltaire is difficult to get at; that Rousseau was certainly not always in his right senses; that Burns never came home in a state when he could not see that the house was safe, and 6 convey himself to bed somehow; that there | seek in the life of an author for that interis no real evidence of Swift's marriage est which, existing in all men's lives, must with Stella, though the story has so often necessarily exist in a higher degree in sharpened an attack on his memory; those of superior intellect and keener senand they make other discoveries, which sibility. It will not be the same in kind, rob some ugly traditions of their sting. but it need not be less in extent than that Possibly, too, they discover, on the intel- attaching to the careers of other conspiculectual side of the inquiry, that it was only ous persons. Nor need they confine themin large companies that Addison could not selves to the more striking men. The talk, while Swift, Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Diary' of Casaubon, though it records Berkeley, Burns and Byron, Johnson and little but the old scholar's readings and his Burke, were all amongst the first talkers domesticities, is one of the most attractive of their times; as Congreve, Sheridan, books, in its way, that we know. The and Colman, the wittiest writers, were characters of Gray, Cowper, and Shenalso the wittiest talkers of their generation. stone, as exhibited in their letters, and In short, much of the traditionary mystifi- illuminated by the criticism of Mason, cation of the whole subject vanishes on Southey, and Disraeli, afford beautiful stuinquiry, and a man of plain good sense is dies of the finer varieties of the intellect. likely to arrive at the conclusion, that It is this philosophical interest which must authors are not a caste or peculiar class, be aimed at, and the reward is not less such as the Struldbrugs, but exceedingly great when a success is achieved than in like other specimens of the genus homo, other cases. Bad as our literary biograwith a little more faculty, the exertion of phy is, and obsolete as most of it has bewhich is not so public in its mode of action come, Boswell's Johnson' is still the most as the faculty of the majority, but which is popular biography in the language, and just as naturally related to character. The has been exerting of late years a beneficial contrary notions which have prevailed owe effect on the art. their success to the circumstance that the species man of letters is of later date in Europe than others, and naturally worse understood; while the connexion between the nature of the class and their work is less easy to trace, though not less real, than that prevailing elsewhere-facts which, when the popular taste for marvels is allowed for, go far to explain the current delusions on the subject. The tendency to exaggerate the importance of literature which prevailed in the last century contributed to invest it with mystic and superstitious associations. But there has been an effectual reaction against that tendency, in the great movements following the French Revolution-in the more commercial and plebeian tone of modern society -and in that general depreciation which the universal diffusion of anything in a diluted and deteriorated form is apt to produce. What is now wanted in literary biography is that biographers, finally clearing their heads of the old prejudices, should * Lord John Russell, in his 'Memoirs of Moore,' affords an example of the propensity to believe that men of letters, from some peculiarity of the tribe, differ from ordinary persons of sense and knowledge. It is their tendency,' says he, to be dissatisfied with the governments under which they live. His instances are the dislike of Plato's school to the Democracy, and that of Voltaire's to the old French régime. He forgets the great majority of thinkers believe that, in these cases, the men of letters were in the right.. Boswell was not the first man to see how a literary biography might be made. attractive by a fuller revelation of its subject than was common. Mason had been beforehand with him in his 'Gray,' and he acknowledged the obligation. Generally speaking, Boswell's originality was not in his method; nor was his effect produced so much by his talents (though they are absurdly underrated in the common opinion) as by his character. He felt for Johnson that antique loyalty which, taking another direction, was the cause of his Toryism; a downright reverence for genius and worth, such as had inspired, in olden times, the haughtiest gentlemen of Europe with a respect for the magnates of the Church. This is one of the most precious of the feudal traditions. An upstart would have felt the comparative poverty of the great Samuel, and a mere man-of-letters would hardly have taken so much pains. with a brother of the guild. Bozzy, with all his faults and absurdities, was a gentleman in spirit as in blood, of the old rock," whose very pride had an element of good in it. He braved the ridicule of the cynics, who could not understand his heart-felt reverence for the rough old philosopher of Fleet-street, and consecrated his life to the service of a life that he felt to be higher. We are inclined to think that it would read a lesson to many a man of more pretentious literary parts to inquire how and why it should have been that all the crack |